Yesterday, it was a pretty unexciting day until the word came out that the Inflatin Reduction Act had been passed by the Senate. I picked up a very short, graphic short take about it, figuring there will be plenty of time to discuss it at length.
Cartoon – .(which forgot to insert before posting, but went back and added later)
Short Takes –
Letters from an American – August 6, 2022
Quote – “Gentlemen,” [Garfield] said, “ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet tonight as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought…. [W]e will remember our allies who fought with us,” he told them. “Soon after the great struggle began, we looked beyond the army of white rebels, and saw 4,000,000 of [B]lack people condemned to toil as slaves for our enemies; and we found that the hearts of these 4,000,000 were God-inspired with the spirit of liberty, and that they were all our friends.” As the audience cheered, he continued: “We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin.” Click through for the background and what happened next. White supremacy = corruption. President Garfield was ambidextrous, multilingual, and so good at multitasking that he could write in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other at the same time. That means nothing – but this speech meant something. So, of course, they killed him.
Yesterday, Despite not having slept all that well, I got the blog posts up and sent the weekly email, but I didn’t do much else. An unexpected but very welcom Sound Off! did go up before the end of the day – don’t miss it.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Psyche (via Aeon) – The power of Langston Hughes’s ‘melancholy citizenship’
Quote – Hughes calls the people ‘humble, hungry, mean … despite the dream’. Whether one is ‘the poor white, fooled and pushed apart’ or ‘the Negro bearing slavery’s scars’, ‘the red man driven from the land’ or ‘the immigrant clutching the hope I seek’, all must live in the space between abstract ideals and the bitter world. To create a world better than the one into which we are born, Hughes urges victims of colonisation and slavery to find ways to discover common ground with beneficiaries of past injustices. Click through for full idea. Poetry is not scary. It’s mostly the expressions of simple truths in unexpected ways that make people see them as new, even if thet’re actually very old.
Letters From An American – July 23, 2022
Quote – Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party. Click through for full letter. Richardson is not being alarmist. She makes it pellucidly clear what we are up against. This needs to be read or heard by every American, particularly every American who is not already deeply aware of politics.
Glenn Kirschner- Lindsey Graham desperate to avoid testifying about Trump’s Georgia election crimes
Meidas Touch – Angry Tennessee Brando gives EPIC REACTION to Jan 6 Hearings
CBS News – Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Adam Schiff expresses concern over witness safety
White Supremacy (A Rebuttal) | Christopher Titus | Zero Side Effects
John Fugelsang “Caffeinated” – The US Has a Joe Manchin & Krysten Sinema Problem. Here is a Solution for you Biden! (a re-re;ease – but still accurate)
Beau – Let’s talk about benefits and Republicans telling you who they are….
Yesterday, I slept in so got a late start – but woke up thinking “Ah – special days are nice but it’s good to sink back into routine.”There was also lots of news – nothing huge, but interesting. I even found a couple of soties to far out I might want to do a “News of the Weird” post (unless Nameless wants them forst.) On Thursday, a new public hearing is expected, and I do look forward to one that I won’t have to juggle. I also think we can expect that it wont be the lastone. Some of the additional evidence is going to be (well, if they spoke up, I guess I can too,) but some is going to be (OMG, I thought for sure someone would have reported that, I thought there were dozens of us who knew,” and that is going to be special. BTW, don’t miss Nameless post yesterday.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Carol Leonnig Drops Small Grenade About Secret Service Records
Quote – “I learned about an episode that has never really been reported, in which a series of boxes, and only the boxes that contained the juicy bits, so to speak, disappeared from the Secret Service archives at the same time then a committee that replaced the Warren Commission, if you will, a committee of Congress was investigating a series of reports the Secret Service agents and headquarters had received numerous warnings and early red flags that Kennedy was being targeted by people who wanted to shoot him from a high spot in a building,” she said. Click through – it’s short – certainly thought provoking.
Letters from an American – July 17, 2022
Quote – Shaw and his men had shipped out of Boston at the end of May 1863 for Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Union had gained an early foothold in its war to prevent the Confederates from dismembering the country. The men of the 54th knew they were not like other soldiers: they were symbols of how well Black men would fight for their country. This, in turn, would be a statement of whether Black men could truly be equal to white men under the country’s laws, once and for all, for in this era, fighting for the country gave men a key claim to citizenship. The whole country was watching…and the soldiers knew it. Click through for full story – which is also the basis for the movie “Glory.” Not that I’ve seen it, but the musical score is a favorite of people who make radio shows arounf film music, and I’vs heard the music a lot. And occsionally a quote. One quote, attributed to Shaw’s father, always cokes me up – “My God! What a bodyguard he has!” Yes, it smacks of privilege, but it’s also a tribute.
Glenn – J6 committee subpoenas WH Counsel Pat Cipollone. Will he testify or coverup Trump’s crimes?
Meidas Touch – Michael Cohen REACTS to Trump attacks on Cassidy Hutchinson
Robert Reich – The Supreme Court’s War on the People (yes, I also used the text article.)
Beloved Community Talks | The Replacement Theory and White Fear: It Starts in Our Minds
This is a seminar produced by The King Center through “The Beloved Comunity Speaks” program, and it is 45 minutes even after I cut off some intro. I don’t expect anyone to watch it without setting aside time to do so, and I understand anyone who doesn’t want to do that. I share it mainly because I have a long online relationship with Scott. When he first “came out” on LinkedIn as a “reformed racist” in 2010 (and asked for advice how best to help eliminate racism from anyone willing to give it), I was new to LinkedIn myself but I felt I had to respond with support, and we have been LinkedIn contacts ever since. It hasn’t been easy for him (racism is not the only thing he is recovering from) but he has never wavered. He works with The King Center at least annually now. I’m proud to know him.
Puppet Regine – CoVid-19
Beau – Let’s talk about Elmo and a phrase I never thought I say….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
This is not the first time I (or TC) have written about Juneteenth, but I don’t like to let it slip away. Confederates of the 1860’s (and earlier and later) could certainly give today’s Republicans a run for their money on delusion and denial – and mean spirited arrogance. “Well, just don’t tell them they’re free, and they’ll have to stay enslaved.” I apologize if that prompted a Barf Bag – especially when there are so many delicacies to celebrate with.
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Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too
Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, held in ‘East Woods’ on East 24th St. in Austin, Texas. Austin History Center
The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.
The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.
The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.
As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.
There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.
In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.
As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.
The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.
The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.
The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.
The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.
In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.
Emancipation myths and realities
On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.
The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”
At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.
After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.
Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.
All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.
President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Getty Images
Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.
After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.
Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”
Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
The meaning of Juneteenth
Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.
A Black woman raises her fist in the air during a Juneteenth reenactment celebration in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 2021. Mark Felix /AFP/Getty Images
On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.
They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.
Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.
At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”
The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I know you’re busy, but if you can manage, you might just want to track down some of those slaveowners in the underworld and give them a piece of all our minds. Not that they probably haven’t heard it – but those are mighty thick heads to try to get it through to.
Yesterday was fairly routine. I did watch the second hour of the hearings – and I have to say I was glad they adjourned – I don’t know how much more I could have withstood. I watched here, so I got no commentary. After looking around afterwards, I started looking for any other sources, especially those which might continue to be available in case anyone else missed anything. The first one I found was PBS (I have set this to start just as the hearing does, so it may be a little choppy.) Meidas Touch also made it avaiabe trough The Tony Michaels podcast. It was still going when I found it, so I didn’t try to look for a starting time. Those commenting there are likely, some of them, to be familiar (Texas Paul is one, but others have also been seen in the Video Thread here.) I did look for MSNBC, but didn’t have a lot of time to look, and only found a clip on it.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Crooks & Liars – Here’s What A Real Expert Has To Say About Active Shooters
Quote – This event isn’t a real team building exercise, however, but a powerful new PSA put out by March For Our Lives, the gun control group that formed in the wake of 2018’s Parkland school shooting. The PSA, titled “Generation Lockdown,” seeks to build support for the passage of a bill in the US Senate that would expand background checks for guns. Click through for video and article. I put this here rather than in the Video Thread because the article, I believe, adds content. Someone at DU commented that if this doesn’t break your heart, you probably don’t have one. – let that be a hanky alert.
The Daily Beast – Putin’s Favorite Copycat Gears Up in Panicked Wartime Frenzy
Quote – In the past few days Lukashenko and his advisers have made a flurry of announcements about plans to bolster the Belarusian military. First, they announced Belarus was creating a people’s militia to give a boost to the country’s armed forces. Then they announced both a new military unit on the country’s southern border with Ukraine and new military mobilizations exercises. Click through for details. Frankly, this scares me. Belarus isn’t very big – but then, neither is a straw.
The New Yorker (Daily Shouts) – Racism Outshines Platinum Jubilee
Quote – On Friday, at a service of thanksgiving for Her Majesty at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Racism, attending with its partner, Colonialism, turned things up a notch in haute couture by the House of Anxiety, a dazzling coat composed of thousands of individual boos directed toward Meghan and Harry as they entered the church. When asked about the custom creation, House of Anxiety responded, “White supremacy demands hating the other, and hating the other is the moment.” Click through for article. “Daily Shouts” is a humor column which often comes very close to realiy because its readers are expected to be alert to satire. But frankly, I think this one is TOO close (Harry and Meghan did not, at least I don’t think so, leave early because of any disrespect to Elizabeth, but because two neo Nazis told Harry to his face that Archie was “an abomination” who ought to be “put down.”)
